Gaston, unbidden, went out and returned shortly with a stiff glass of cognac. She took it and helped John to the bed. Then they were alone.
"Is it a fever?" she asked, holding the glass to his lips. "Shall I get the doctor to come in and look at you?"
He snorted glumly. "We're finished, Nora love," he said. "We're ruined." He took no more than a sip of the brandy. "Fucking Beador!"
That more than anything shocked her into the seriousness of it all. John was not a swearing man. Suddenly Tom Cornelius's death and Sarah's tragedy dwindled to nothing.
"How?" she asked, surprised at the calm of her voice. "What has happened?"
His eyes almost met hers, wavered, and lowered again. That struck the fear deep into her. He could not even look her in the eye!
"He's in…" John faltered, then shook his head. "Way over. Way deep."
"Beador? Debt, you mean?"
He shut his eyes and nodded.
"Then thank God we're in a company of limited liability instead of a partnership!"
John did not move. His eyes stayed firmly closed.
She knew then that he had gone against her suggestion. Stevenson's had, indeed, gone into partnership with Beador. And Beador must now have dragged them into some very deep water for John to be so broken up.
It astonished her then that she felt no anger. Perhaps whatever emotion she had to spare that day had already been exhausted. She even managed to put herself in John's shoes—to imagine how it must have been for him to travel, maybe all the way from Beador's place up near Stockton, to here, three or four days, knowing what he had to confess at the end of it.
What could she now possibly say to compare with the self-laceration he must already have inflicted!
"You'd better tell me the size of it," she said. "And then we'll sit down and see how best to tackle it." She sat beside him on the bed.
To her intense embarrassment, as soon as she was within reach, he began to sob. He grasped her tightly, buried his head on her neck and shoulder, and wept. She could smell several days of fear upon him.
"Nora!" he said through his tears. "Thou art a bloody rock! A bloody rock!"
"An ocean rock if you go on at this rate," she said. She hated the exhibition he was giving. The last thing she felt like was a rock.
He regained a little calm and even managed a tight smile. "For the first time in…oh, days," he said, "I feel a little hope."
"There!"
He was dour again. "But not much."
"It's bad?"
"Over a hundred thousand pounds." Now that he had finally named the figure his voice was calm. He looked at her, so intently that she immediately wondered how much protective charade there had been in his earlier behaviour.
No sooner had the thought struck her than she began to feel a sort of backlash of self-disgust at her own detachment. But she thrust the feeling aside; for the moment her lack of emotion was too valuable to squander in self-examination.
"How?" she asked. "Hudson couldn't possibly have missed anything that size. Is he behind this? Surely not!"
"It's since Hudson. Even since Beador furnished us with his list."
"You'd better explain why it is we're in partnership. It's news to me."
He took her hand. "Where you sit, surrounded by your ledgers, things must often look very simple. But for me, out there in the thick of things…"
"I'm not criticizing you, love." She gripped back more firmly to show that she meant it.
"If you were, you couldn't outdo me. Oh, I blame myself right enough." He let go of her, as if to stress his unworthiness.
She folded her hands below the mountain of her belly. A further twinge told her that her labour had definitely begun. Well, she would suppress all outward sign of it as long as possible. Too much was at stake over these next few hours.
"How has it come about, then?" she pressed.
"How does anything come about between the gentry and the aristocracy? It was a wager. I sometimes think they even get married only as the result of wagers."
Relief welled up within her: a wager! She even laughed. "But no wager is legally enforceable…" she began, before she saw John's face. "Why not?" she added.
"You listen! Sir George Beador had a wager with Lord Wyatt—on a horse in some local steeplechase. They were both drunk, of course. Lord Wyatt has speculated in railway shares to the tune of two hundred thousand pounds— which he can probably well afford. In fact, to prove he can afford it, he bets our friend Beador another two hundred thou'—only his stake is his shares."
"I don't follow that. Surely Beador at last understands…"
"I mean that when Beador lost, as of course he did, he didn't pay Wyatt two hundred thousand; he simply accepted Wyatt's liability of worthless shares."
For a moment Nora was too shocked even to breathe. "I don't think Wyatt was drunk at all," she said at last. "Two…hundred…thousand!" she repeated. She spaced the words out as if that might diminish the sum.
"I'm assuming we can get rid of half—even more—before the bubble breaks. But I think it would be foolish to bank on doing better than that."
"But why did you say more than a hundred thousand, then?"
"Call it pessimism—I mean, that's what we ought to prepare to face. D'you think we can do it?"
"If we can use the trust fund."
"No!" He was suddenly vehement, assertive, more like his true self—as she had intended when she made the suggestion. "That fund is for you and the children if…" He had finished the sentence many times in the past, but now that the firm's ruin was inevitable, he could only let the ending hang. "It is never to be used, never, not for the rescue of our firm."
"If I'd had the management of it," she said, "it would pay Beador's debt and leave over as much as Chambers has now."
He nodded, not in agreement but to avoid a dispute.
"I'm sorry to have to press the point, John, but I'd still like to know why we are in partnership with that man."
He screwed up his face. "These new-fangled companies of limited liability," he said. "The law isn't a year old yet. Too uncertain, you see? There's no case law to guide us."
"That sounds more like Chambers talking than you."
John only nodded.
She got down from the bed and crossed to the window. The courtyard was empty. "Sound, dependable Chambers," she murmured.
"To change the subject," he said, "how about Sarah? How has she taken it? Pretty hard, I imagine."
"Pretty hard."
A cat stalked warily into the yard and sniffed at some fish offal lying on the cobbles.
"An extraordinary thing happened, you know. About a fortnight ago." John's voice was very level. "Tom Cornelius walked into our London office and put near enough to forty thousand pounds in Bank of England notes on Jackson's desk and said, 'This is for Mr. Stevenson. He knows all about it.' Poor Jackson nearly threw a fit."
For a long minute, long enough for the cat to take up the offal and slink back beneath the archway, Nora kept silent. "We must see that Sarah gets it," she said at last.
"No doubt of it."
"Were those his exact words: 'This is for Mr. Stevenson'?" She looked hard at John.
"Jackson has already sworn an affidavit to it." He smiled. "Thank God I took that precaution—just in case there was ever any dispute."
"Did we pay Cornelius the equivalent in francs?"
"I have brought the draft with me, ready to give to him."
"Well," she said. "There's no immediate hurry."
They avoided each other's eyes. The temptation was too great, its arrival too providential, for either of them to disavow it out of hand. "Perhaps…" Nora began, but she did not finish the sentence.
"We'll see," John said.
"Yes. And I must have another word with Gaston. Sarah will probably not want to stay on here."
They went downstairs.
Gaston told them that the owner of the inn, a Monsieur Colbert, had allowed the Corneliuses to move in on a caretaker lease after paying a deposit. He had already called several times for the balance but Mr. Cornelius had always managed to postpone the payment. But now…?
No wonder Gaston was worried.
A possibility occurred to Nora: If Sarah did not complete the purchase, then she herself could probably get the inn a little cheaper from the worried Monsieur Colbert. A safe bolthole in Normandy for herself and John might not come amiss in the near future.
Before she could begin to work the conversation around to these ideas, the two Corneilles, aunt and uncle, came in. After Nora had presented them to John, Madame announced that they were intending to stay indefinitely.
"Until after the funeral," Corneille explained.
"Indefinitely!" his wife contradicted.
"Ah," Nora said, smiling warmly. "To help poor Sarah. How kind of you, Madame. But I"—she patted the bulge of her dress—"am unlikely to be leaving soon, as you may see. So if you have urgent business at home in Montauban, I would be very…"
Madame Corneille's smile was almost an open sneer. "That is more than kind, Mrs. Stevenson. But it may not fall to Sarah, or to you, to see to Thomas's affairs."
Everyone looked at her in silence. Her enthusiasm had led her to make the point in a truculent way. She tried now to recover. "I mean…" She coughed a single, placatory laugh and smiled invitingly. "It may not be possible. It is a matter for the law." She looked at each again, smiling still. "The law, you see."
"But how, my dear?" Corneille pressed. "What law?"
Now his wife was embarrassed. "Well," she said unwillingly, "if—I say
if
, only if you see—if it should happen that in French law, you see, you understand, that the marriage is not complete, then you, dearest, are next of kin."
She used the phrase
le plus proche-parent
, which John had to translate to Nora.
"Eh bien. Alors?"
Corneille shrugged, still not grasping her conclusion. She made an exasperated noise.
"What Madame means," Nora said, "is that you, Monsieur Corneille, must then administer affairs."
Madame Corneille, not welcoming help from this suspect quarter, stared coldly at Nora, so that she only half-heard John's blunt: "She means, m'sieu, that you will inherit the estate."
Corneille's anger brought his wife back from her inspection of Nora. He was outraged. It was intolerable. It was monstrous. Had they not enough already? Was he not one of the richest men in Montauban? Had they come here to steal from his nephew, his dear brother's son? What law could force him to do such a thing? The law! The law…he ranted on, blaming the law, while his eyes murdered his wife.
It was the wrong response.
He does not know how to manage her,
John thought. If he had tried to ease her from her embarrassment, or abruptly and firmly changed the subject, or even scolded her openly, it might have served. But to scold her obliquely, in the guise of the law, merely gave her the chance to press her point without, ostensibly, attacking her husband's authority.
"The law,
chéri,
is the law. We may have our own opinion of its stupidity, but we must obey its command. Things must be done through regulation or they may later be challenged and upset…" And so on. She was in triumphant spate when Corneille's face dropped and he rose to his feet. His eyes were fixed on something behind her. She turned and halted in mid-sentence.
There at the bottom of the staircase stood Sarah, one hand still on the kingpost, as if to say that part of her would rather not enter this room and its company. Nora was glad to see she was angry.
"Madame!" Corneille started toward her but she withdrew a pace onto the first step, which stopped him halfway across the room.
"I will save you all such trouble," she said. "Tomorrow I shall sign a paper renouncing all claim to Thomas's estate. It shall be yours."
She turned at once and went back upstairs, leaving them silent. John, seeing Nora's face screwed-up against another twinge, misinterpreted it as the anger he expected to discover.
Corneille turned on his wife. "There!" he shouted in fury. "There! You see! Her husband not cold and you…"
"No!" She cut him short. "It is a trick." She turned to Nora, including her in the charge. "It's a trick! If we accept the offer, we recognize her right to make it. So we would accept her marriage. And then,
alors,
pfft!"
Corneille turned to John and Nora and shrugged an apology.
"I think," Nora said, taking John's arm, "I shall retire." At the foot of the stairs she said to John: "The baby is coming. I'm sure of it. Perhaps you should get Gaston to call back the doctor."
His response was immediate. He lifted her in his arms and carried her effortlessly to the stairhead. "Are you sure?" he said. "Yes, you must be. Will you be all right? Of course, yes, of course you will be. Is it bad?"
She laughed. "Just think," she teased. "In a week or two we can take our greens without contortion!"
"How can you!" He pretended disgust. "At such a time."
"You have a puritan heart," she began, before the sight of Sarah, in the doorway of Cornelius' room, stopped her.
"Dr. Grimble was sending a woman," she said. "I thought—are you all right?"
"The baby is coming," Nora said.
It was a second or two before the idea took hold. "Baby? Your baby! Ah!" She looked around, lost.
"May we send Gaston for Dr. Grimble?" John asked.